WatDabney

I've been deliberately avoiding addressing that whole aspect of it, since Trump and Musk are the obvious primary insurrectionists - the day-to-day leaders of this brazen attempt to overthrow the US government and install a plutocratic autocracy in its place.

But yes.

Of course they would be, which is why they're not going to happen.

The deportations serve three main purposes:

1. They appeal to Trump's racist base and further divisions between the people broadly.
2. They establish precedents for the detention of whoever the Trump administration declares to be rightfully detained (which will certainly not be limited to, or even primarily, undocumented immigrants).
3. They make the remaining undocumented immigrants just that much more desperate and willing to endure oppression.

To fulfill those purposes, there's no need to deport all undocumented immigrants or even any really significant percentage of them. All that's necessary is to make the deportations that will happen as merciless and vivid and well publicized as possible.

And once those purposes have been served, the program can be quietly moved out of the spotlight and American businesses can take advantage of the cheap labor provided by undocumented immigrants who are even more desperate than they were before Trump took office.

The Trump administration is systematically purging anyone who worked on the investigations into his criminal activities.

If that isn't sufficient to trigger a significant response from the Senate all by itself, then they're rather obviously part of the problem, and likely complicit in Trump's current ongoing efforts to overthrow the US government and repace it with a plutocratic autocracy with himself as supreme ruler.

Pretend you know nothing at all about "AI"/LLMs, and someone comes to you and says, "I want to start a service that will scrape everything that anyone's ever posted to the internet, let some corporate weasels decide which parts of it you're allowed to see, then feed you bits and pieces of what's left in some order or another."

Does that sound appealing?

shifts that could help the GOP or moderate Democrats

So are there people who sincerely believe this bullshit spin? Is it an unrealistically widespread conspiracy of misinformation? Is it indoctrination and confirmation bias?

To anyone with a working brain and a speck of integrity, it's blatantly obvious that the domination of the party (and most notably the DNC) by "moderates" (which is to say, neoliberal hacks) is the exact problem with the Democrats, and the exact reason that so many people hate both parties. That's the whole basis for the durability of the claim that both parties are the same - the Democrats are so "moderate" that there isn't enough difference to overcome that claim.

Trump's ascension and the collapse of the already toxically moderate Democrats sure as fuck isn't an opportunity for moderate Democrats - that's just more of what's already failed. It's an opportunity for progressives. It's an opportunity for the Democrats to reclaim the left, and much more to the point, their role as the party of the people - the party that stands for the people against the depradations of the ruling class.

I understand that the party hierarchy don't want that - that they're perfectly content to just gorge themselves at the soft money trough and let the people suffer - but honestly, fuck them. It's long past time to get them out of the way.

So again, do people sincerely believe this "opportunity for moderates" bullshit? Is it some unrealistically widespread conspiracy? Is it just indoctrination and confirmation bias?

And more importantly, how do we overcome it, and not just sometime, but in time to save the American people from plutocratic autocracy?

Of course it has.

There are two qualities that are crucial to fulfilling Trump's dictatorial ambitions - hatred and ignorance. He needs people to be hateful enough to support his overtly destructive and oppressive rule and ignorant enough to not figure out that they will suffer/are suffering right alongside the people they hate.

Step 1 was to gain control of the legacy media and social media and he's mostly already done that (there are still some holdouts, but they'll have to be destroyed if they won't submit and that will come later). Step 2 is to solidify control of the governmental distribution of information and use that to suppress information that might undermine his dictatorial ambitions and promote and even manufacture information that will further them. That's exactly what he and his co-conspirators and their mercenaries are doing right now.

Musk wants in on the cascade of ~~bribes~~ settlements that Trump has been collecting.

Partisanship in a corrupt system requires at least some willful blindness.

This is a bribe.

This is what the US has come to. A billionaire just openly and brazenly paid the President of the United States a bribe.

Is anyone going to do anything about it?

Chrono Trigger - SNES, 1995

Seriously - who would've thought that American liberty, justice and democracy would be destroyed by a smelly old fat man in clown makeup who never managed to outgrow being a spoiled toddler?

As if Trump is subject to court rulings...